This Sculpture Was Designed And 3D Printed By An A.I. Artist

Can computers make art? That’s one of the questions animating the field of computational creativity, which seeks to design artificial intelligence that can replicate human creativity. We wrote recently about a Google effort to create algorithms that make original music. But what if artificial intelligence could design and make 3D objects you could actually hold in your hand? That was the challenge that Joel Lehman, an assistant professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, set out to tackle. Lehman wondered if he could somehow leverage the remarkable image recognition power of deep neural networks (DNN) to create new artifacts without human input. The key, he felt, would be to combine a DNN with an evolutionary algorithm, a process that employs mechanisms that mimic natural evolution, such as selection, reproduction, and…